By Anonymous, Jul 22, 2009 in Pedagogy and Teaching
I am sure that most of us remember being dragged to some historical site with our classmates sometime back in the 5th or 6th grade. Ah! The field trip! Teachers screaming, students playing jokes on one another, chaos!….A learning opportunity? Hardly.
I remember well my 5th grade field trip to Chalmette, Louisiana to visit the battlefield where Andrew Jackson and his motley crew whipped the British in January 1815. The topic of conversation that day revolved around a replica of a Congreve Rocket in the display case at the battlefield. The boys of the class were wondering how we could make one of those with left-over fireworks from New Years Eve.
Now these stories certainly make me laugh, but as a teacher of American history I have wondered whether or not I could use field trips with my courses. Thus far, I have taken one field trip with a class. I have another one planned in a couple of weeks.
In May 2007 I taught a two week course on the American Revolution in the South. (I teach in the Atlanta area.) The class met daily for 6 hours. The class was small. It was tiring. But, the highlight of the course came on the last day. My students and I piled into a couple of cars and drove to South Carolina to visit the battlefields of Kings Mountain and Cowpens (both are national military parks). The trip was very successful. The week of the trip, the students had to write battle summaries of either battle. I let them choose which one.
The students loved it. Both battlefields are relatively well-preserved (the park rangers were very helpful). Students who had written a summary of King’s Mountain told the rest of the group what they knew as we walked the trail. At Cowpens the same thing occurred. Students commented that they thought that they understood those battles in a deeper way. Then, after a whirlwind tour – about 2 hours per site – we got back into the cars and drove back to campus. It was a full day, but a rewarding one.
This May I taught another two week course. This time the class was significantly larger (about 4 times bigger). The topic was the Opening of the Old Southwest, 1783-1815. We studied the push into Tennessee, west Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The class material ended with the Battle of New Orleans. For reasons beyond my control, we could not take a field trip on the last day of class. But, I promised the students that I would run a voluntary trip in July. We are going to visit Horseshoe Bend National Military Park in “LA” (for those unfamiliar with the great state of Alabama, that stands for “Lower Alabama”), the site of Andrew Jackson’s March 1814 victory over the Red Stick Creeks in the Creek War. I have a number of students coming along. We are looking forward to it.
There are some problems, however. Funding is always difficult to obtain. The time commitment is sometimes big. Many of my students are non-traditional students. This is both good and bad. I rarely have to worry about irresponsible behavior, but they usually have jobs and families, limiting their willingness to give up a day to go on a field trip. I have found that the students take much from these experiences, especially if I build assignments about the historic site BEFORE we go.
I would love to hear from other professors who have attempted field trips. I am always looking for tips.
2 Responses to "Reviving the Field Trip"
Lee Trepanier on Jul 26, 2009
You might want to consider re-classifying your course as the equivalent of a "study abroad" in order to secure funding from your institution. We have done course which essentially are study abroad courses but in Washington DC or Lansing (our state capital) and justified it to administration as the equivalent of a study abroad (at our school, study abroad courses are considered a priority and therefore get generous fundings).
If you want to stick to the one or two day field-trips to certain sites, you might consider asking the institutions there if they could provide some sort of matching fundings. Another resource to tap into is the state's historical societies. Finally, you might want to factor in the costs of the trip into your syllabus, as we do with assigned readings.
Phil Hamilton on Aug 2, 2009
I try to incorporate field trips into my classes. In my opinion, though, logistics are the biggest headache, even more than obtaining funding. Several years ago, I taught a freshman seminar on the Jamestown colony and we traveled to the original site for an all-day visit. The 38 students who went (from 2 sections) had to pay for a box lunch and the cost of the bus. It was a great day overall, but you are correct that students must have an assignment build into the class beforehand for the experience to be really meaningful. But setting this trip up was extremely time-consuming. Not hard, but it just took a lot of time.
Due to this, I haven’t led another such trip. But I do frequently create extra credit assignments for some of my courses (both lower- and upper-level) for field trips I typically lead on the weekend for my university’s History Club. I teach in eastern Virginia and there are plenty of colonial, Revolutionary, and Civil War sites within several hours drive. For instance, we’ve recently been to Monticello, Williamsburg, and Petersburg. These are much easier to do. Because they always occur on a weekend and because the trips are not mandatory, I don’t have to worry about students who have other commitments. I just have to arrange for a university van.
And the trips themselves are deeply satisfying. Not only do I enjoy traipsing around old battlefields and other historic sites, but the students get a lot out of them and genuinely appreciate my giving up a Saturday to lead them.